Shifting from art film to documentary, Spell Reel re-animates the historic colonial archive to construct considered “cine-kinships” between past and present.

This event is a screening of two films, reflecting the work of Luta Ca Caba Inda (The Struggle is not Over Yet), an ongoing, experimental arts project, embarked on by a cine-collective involving artist Filipa César, and filmmakers, Sana na N’Hada and Flora Gomes, that seeks to digitise and re-animate the nearly destroyed archive of anti-colonial cinema shot in Guinea-Bissau during 1970s.

Spell Reel (2017) follows the progression of this collaborative process, watching as the digitised material is toured by mobile cinema, engaging the public in a considered entanglement of past and present to raise questions of the “living” archive’s role in contemporary questions of decolonisation.

O Regresso de Amílcar Cabral (The Return of Amílcar Cabral, 1976) is the only remaining feature film from the period within the archive of the National Film Institute of Guinea-Bissau (INCA). Created three years following the assassination of the revolutionary leader’s assassination, the film records the transferral of Cabral’s remains from Conakry to Bissau. It will be screened as an optional event following the conclusion of Spell Reel (2017).

The two films will begin with a short introduction by University of Leeds, PhD researcher, Tom Vickery. Tom, working in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, is researching the proactive historic imaginary within the deployment of archival material across Luta Ca Caba Inda’s many contemporary iterations.